Half a Terabyte on 2.5 Inches: Nine Hard Disk Drives Roundup. Page 4

Some time ago we already reviewed the first 2.5-inch models with 500 GB storage capacity. Now time has come to compare side by side the solutions from all manufacturers that are currently available in the market.

Performance in Intel IOMeter

Sequential Read & Write Patterns

IOMeter is sending a stream of read and write requests with a request queue depth of 4. The size of the requested data block is changed each minute, so that we could see the dependence of the hard drive’s sequential read/write speed on the size of the requested data block. This test is indicative of the highest speed the drive can achieve.

The numeric data can be viewed in tables. We will discuss graphs and diagrams.

We can see very diverse results at reading. Just as expected, the Seagate 7200.4 delivers the highest top speed. It stops very short of the 100MBps mark in this test. The Fujitsu is the best among the 5400rpm models, reaching 87.5MBps. Judging by the gap from the Hitachi 7K500, the transition to the denser platters brought a 15MBps advantage to Hitachi’s HDDs. Therefore the Samsung M6 performs impressively. Despite 3 platters, it is very fast at reading. It seems to have a rather high recording density along the tracks.

The HDDs differ greatly on small data blocks and in terms of reaching the top speed. The Toshiba and Seagate 5400.6 reach their best as soon as 2KB data blocks whereas the Fujitsu, being the fastest in terms of top speed, accelerates to its full on 32KB data chunks only. Take note that the Seagate 5400.6 and 7200.4, although actually from the same product generation, handle small blocks differently: the 7200rpm HDD is slower than the 5400rpm model then.

The HDDs from Hitachi and Samsung show some good progress. The increased recording density and the reduced number of platters lead to a higher top speed and faster processing of small data blocks.

The HDDs’ speeds are more uniform at writing. Most of the new models go neck and neck. Somewhat surprisingly, the Fujitsu falls behind, being inferior to the 3-platter models even. Oddly enough, the Seagate 7200.4 is no different from the 5400rpm HDDs here. The Western Digital is obviously superior to the others when writing small data blocks.